Midori (美登里) is a sexologist, educator, author, artist, and coach based in San Francisco. For English-speaking readers she is a basic bridge between Japanese rope craft and Western sex education. She wrote the first English-language instructional book on Japanese rope bondage, and she has kept publishing and teaching on alternative sexual practice, including BDSM, sexual fetishism, bondage, and erotic fiction. She teaches classes, speaks at conferences, coaches individuals and professionals, and runs multi-day intensives. For adults learning rope, the classes are about skill and relationship. They are not a crime manual.
Midori was born in Kyoto, Japan, to one Japanese parent and one German parent. She grew up in Tokyo and moved to the United States at fourteen. She studied psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as a United States Army Reserve intelligence officer while finishing the degree. Early on she worked as a sales representative for a condom manufacturer and spent several years as a sex educator with San Francisco Sex Information. After military service she started an art career, performing in queer nightclubs and working with other transgressive and experimental artists. That Bay Area scene is part of what later fed her kink teaching.
Intensives, art, and the shelf
Internationally she teaches BDSM, alternative sexuality, feminine dominance, Shibari, and kink in the broad sense. She speaks at conferences, universities, and organizations concerned with sexual health, wellness, and education. In 2021 she and the Sexual Health Alliance built the year-long Kink Informed Certification, the KIC program, training therapists, educators, coaches, and consultants who work with clients involved in kink, BDSM, and alternative sexuality. The program moves that work from community workshops toward formal professional literacy for clinicians.
She is known for weekend intensives, including ForteFemme: Women’s Dominance Intensive and Rope Dojo: Rope Bondage Weekend Intensive. Both use her head-heart-hands method: cognitive framing, emotional honesty, and practical skill in the same room. The focus is real intimate relationships, self-actualization, less shame, acceptance, and justice. Rope and dominance, in this teaching, are practice for a whole person. Pretty knots for photographs are not the point.
As a multidisciplinary social-practice artist she makes installations and performances and joins group shows. The work looks at human narrative, queer culture, Asian American and Pacific Islander cultural experience, and how memory and place do not last. Venues include the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Leslie Lohman Museum, among others. She also offers creative coaching and consulting through Intersection for the Arts, a Bay Area nonprofit. The art career and the kink teaching handle the same subjects: the body, culture, and temporary spaces of intensity.
Her awards include Woman of the Year at the Pantheon of Leather Awards in 2003, being sainted by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in 2007, Best Sex Educator from SF Weekly in 2013, the Society of Janus Hall of Fame in 2019, and the AASECT Humanitarian Award in 2022.
The books adult learners actually use run from The Seductive Art of Japanese Rope Bondage, Greenery Press, 2002, widely cited as the first English instructional book on Japanese rope bondage, to Wild Side Sex and The Toybag Guide to Foot and Shoe Worship in 2005, and the erotic fiction Master Han’s Daughter in 2006. Later work includes the co-authored Silk Threads in 2019 and the co-authored An Intersectional Approach to Sex Therapy in 2022. Her papers from 1990 to 2014, the FetishDiva Midori papers, are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. English-language rope teaching and public kink education sit in a research collection now, past the old club handouts. The same career runs through kinbaku instruction, foot and shoe worship, erotic fiction, intersectional sex therapy, clinician certification, and museum-adjacent art.
